Can you taste it?  New features like Lambdas, Jigsaw modularity, and the rest of Project Coin are finally on their way along with Java 8 now that Oracle has set some high level release dates for JDK8.  Expect the first Milestone by the end of the month!  See full date list below:

• M1: April 24, 2012
• M2: June 14, 2012
• M3: July 30, 2012
• M4: September 11, 2012
• M5: November 26, 2012
• M6: January 30, 2013 (Recommended Feature Complete date)
• GA: September 2013

Mathias Axelsson, the lead release manager for the Oracle JDK introduced these dates on the OpenJDK mailing list.  He was also aware of the fiasco surrounding the critical bug found in Java 7 by Apache Lucene developers.  So he laid out his plan to preven that from happening again:

In order to reduce the likelihood of critical bugs being discovered very 
late in the game, as had happened in the final days of JDK 7 stabilization 
with bugs that were discovered [2] by Apache Lucene developers, I would 
like to recommend that we set a date for when testing and bug reporting 
should have been completed in order to have enough time to fix them before 
shipping JDK 8. Based on the proposed dates I would recommend that we set 
that date to early April 2013. Bugs reported after this date should be 
looked at (and hopefully fixed) as well but if the reports comes in too late 
it might not be possible to fix them within the JDK 8 time frame. Therefore 
I propose a proactive approach to test early and report the issues so we can 
prioritize the critical bugs as early as possible.

-Mathias Axelsson